The Sinking of the Belgrano - At Last The Truth
- May 2nd 1982

It was the moment which came to define the
Falklands conflict, immediately claiming more than 300 lives and
setting in chain events which would lead to the invasion of the
disputed islands by British troops. Now, as services are held to
mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the war, a member of
Margaret Thatcher's War Cabinet has revealed details of how
intelligence received from the Chilean regime of fascist dictator
Augusto Pinochet led to the decision to sink the Argentine warship
General Belgrano.

The sinking of the former US warship was
controversial because at the time it was outside a British
200-mile Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands and was
steaming away from the UK Task Force. The cruiser went down with
the loss of 323 lives (the Argentines claimed 1022 lives!) more
than half of the total Argentine losses in the war. The
Argentines also claimed ships were conducting a rescue. They had
actually fled.

In an exclusive interview for a
forthcoming book on the history of Britain, Real Britannia, Lord
Parkinson discloses that the War Cabinet took the decision after
receiving secret intercepts from Chilean intelligence services
revealing the orders from the Argentine junta to the warship's
captain, Hector Bonzo.

Lord Parkinson, one of Lady Thatcher's
closest allies, said: "They [Chile] had intercepted the
Argentinian command's instructions... We had been discussing
what we would do if we found it [the Belgrano] because we knew
the Belgrano was out to sink a carrier. The fact that it was
going one way or the other, it was manoeuvring to avoid a
torpedo."

The Independent has learned from defence
sources that the Chilean information also showed the staff of
Admiral Jorge Anaya, the head of the Argentine Navy, had been
directing orders to the Belgrano and a destroyer, the Hipólito
Bouchard, to continue engaging in combat while taking all
measures necessary to avoid coming under attack. This was
interpreted by the British high command as signifying that
movement towards her home port by the two ships may well have
been acts of subterfuge.

The sinking took place 14 hours after the
President of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde, proposed a peace plan
which included regional states playing a role. After the
sinking, Argentina rejected the plan but the UK indicated its
acceptance on 5 May. It is not well known that the British
continued to offer ceasefire terms until 1 June.

The War Cabinet took the decision to sink
the Belgrano on 2 May 1982, after being briefed at a meeting at
Chequers with Mrs Thatcher and Sir Terence Lewin, Admiral of the
Fleet. Lewin told the Cabinet that Commander Chris
Wreford-Brown, the captain of British nuclear submarine
Conqueror, had the Belgrano in his sights and was seeking
permission to attack. The ship was part of a small battle group,
flanked by two Argentinian destroyers.

The War Cabinet authorised Lewin to
proceed. The order was sent through Northwood, the Navy's
command centre in west London, to the Conqueror. Wreford-Brown
fired two non-guided torpedoes, which blew off the ship's bow.

Lord Parkinson said: "We discussed the
Belgrano ad nauseam and what it was up to. Then up comes the
Captain and says the Belgrano is going into shallower water and
I can't follow it. Something as big as a nuclear submarine in
shallow water was easy to hit. You couldn't allow that risk."

Pictures taken by survivors of the
warship listing to port, before sinking, with orange rafts
floating nearby, became one of the lasting images of the war,
prompting the Sun headline: "Gotcha!"

Protests about the action were led by Tam
Dalyell, the former far left, anti war, Labour MP, who claimed
the sinking had been ordered for political reasons by Lady
Thatcher to destroy the last hopes of a peace plan being pursued
in Peru by Perez de Cuellar, the Peruvian Secretary General of
the UN, and Al Haig, the US Secretary of State. (The
Capt of the Belgrano, around 2017, admitted that he WAS heading
for the british ships, he was not steaming away from the Islands
but towards, and had every intention of attack. He also said
that if he had been the captain of the submarine, he would have
done exactly the same thing).

Lord Parkinson denied this. "It was
nothing to do with that. It was unanimous that if we had let the
Belgrano go and it had sunk a carrier, we would all have been
finished. We would all have had to stand down, if we had
presided over the death of hundreds of British sailors and had
the chance to avert it.

"What we didn't realise [was] the
Argentinian destroyers took off immediately and they didn't
search for survivors. They thought they would all get sunk. When
we finally got the satellite pictures, we had pictures showing
all the Argentine fleet in port."

Lord Parkinson also dispelled one of the
myths of the war, that Britain relied heavily on surveillance
from US satellites. The system was so slow that the US only
supplied the photographs of the Argentine navy back in port the
day after the conflict ended.

His disclosure that Britain received
vital intelligence reports directly from Chile explains why Lady
Thatcher supported General Pinochet when he was arrested in
Britain for alleged war crimes, when he later came for treatment
in a private London clinic. She said at the time that Britain
owed a debt of gratitude to the Chilean leader for helping it
win the war.

It became known later that General
Pinochet had permitted a secret SAS surveillance team to use a
long-range radar facility in Chile to monitor movements by the
Argentine air force from its Comodoro Rivadavia air base – but
until now, it was not known that Lady Thatcher was also supplied
by the Pinochet regime with more vital raw intercept data
revealing the orders to the Argentine commanders in action
around the Falklands.

Real Britannia, Britain's
Proudest Years – The Glory and the Spin, by Colin Brown, will be
published in October by Oneworld